CALGARY, Alberta — A Stone Age boy stands at the center of a controversy over when members of the human evolutionary family first reached heights and weights comparable to those of modern human adults.

All that remains of the ancient, approximately 8-year-old Homo erectus boy today is his nearly complete roughly 1.5-million-year-old skeleton. Excavations in 1984 near Kenya’s Lake Turkana yielded the find, often called Turkana Boy. At the time of the skeleton’s excavation, little was known about adult sizes and growth patterns of H. erectus.

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